I suspect they mean the trolley car problem: "you are either going to crash into a group of school kids, or into a group of nuns. Who do you kill?"
I.e. did the uber car kill this 1 pedestrian, because it avoided killing 2 other people? Did the uber car opt for the "least killing" in this siutation?
I think this whole trolley car question - while a nice philosophical question - is silly though. I dont think humans would do any better in an emergency situation. In that split second when you suddenly find yourself in the "oh sh-<IMPACT>" situation, do you have time to a) make a deliberate, reasoned & fully-informed decision, and then b) control the vehicle effectively to follow through on that decision? I doubt it. If you had a second or two to think it through and then deliberately make a choice and steer towards that crowd of nuns, you'd probably be able to entirely avoid the accident anyway.
More likely is you'd probably do what I am sure most people do which is gasp, stamp on the brakes, shut their eyes and hope for the best ... assuming you even had time to realise there was about to be a crash before it happened. Some people might swerve, but I suspect they do that instinctively to avoid something in their way, not as a decision to hit something else.
I just dont think self-driving cars will get themselves into situations where they have to chose who to kill in the first place. And even if they did get into those situations, I really, really doubt it would be due their actions, and I'd certainly trust it to avoid the crash in the first place a whole lot more than the average human driver in the same scenario.
Some could argue "Ah but yes computers are so fast that they CAN make that informed decision about who to kill in milliseconds! So they have to make a choice! The question stands!". I'd argue back that in those milliseconds before the crash was inevitable, they'd act to prevent the accident before a human would even know what the hell was going on anyway. After that it just starts getting into a game of who can conjure up the most ludicrous hypothetical situation that rarely - if ever - happens in real life.
The most obvious example I've seen is when the car (or indeed driver) has the choice to endanger the passenger or a pedestrian.
For example, if a kid runs out into the road in front of the car, it can drive into the kid, likely with no injuries to the passengers. Or it can swerve and drive off of the road, or into another lane, likely saving the kid but putting the passengers at much greater risk.
As you say, in this or any similar situation the human reaction is probably going to be to instinctively brake or swerve without a chance to consider options or consequences. I feel like a computer will have a few cycles to spare to make decisions like that.
One of the most oft-discussed questions around self-driving cars is what should happen if your car can choose between two options: 1) An action that will have a better chance of protecting the people inside the car, 2) An action that will protect people outside of the car, with a whole bunch of variations.
For example - What if someone steps out into the road and you can either hit them, or run into a wall? The former makes it far more likely the occupants of the car will be safe, the latter saves the life of a pedestrian at the expense of possible injury to people in the car.
It is kind of an interesting question, because people can't generally react quickly and rationally enough in a situation like that for it to matter, but in theory, a computer can. But it also dominates the discussion in a way that likely far overstates how frequently this will actually be a decision a computer has to make.
I think that is what the person you're replying to is asking. Given that this occurred at night and on (very likely) uncrowded streets, I feel like its far more likely the car (and backup driver) just somehow missed the pedestrian.
They're basically asking if the car avoided doing something that would have been more destructive (e.g not hitting 2 people but only hitting one person instead). Or if there was no conflict decision making that happened and the car accidentally ran into the person and it resulted in a fatality.
- AI decides between one life lost as a better potential outcome
- AI made no decision and just happened to hurt someone
I think it's a reference to the imaginary trolley problem, which is often raised as an objection to self-driving capability.
The idea is that making a decision between killing one person vs killing something more valuable than one person (eg. multiple people) is something that drivers do on a regular basis. Computers may not be capable of correctly evaluating the ethics of that decision.
